I am gonna skip the talk on how to recruit on social media, how to review portfolios, prepare design exercises or interview candidates. I want to talk about something more basic than that. For the past year or so, I’ve been religiously working on how to grow my design team and been experiencing various challenges along the way. One of the biggest challenges has been to define the kind of designer we need and want to hire and then look for the right attributes.

We all love to work on our style guides and component libraries, and to mess with the newest, fastest, coolest design tools. But, before we go into the nitty gritty details of how we operate as a design team, we should first define clear design guidelines, a set of principles, and most importantly a framework to inform our design decisions.

As we grow up, we learn the hard way that outside-the-box thinking and creativity is actually perceived as disruption, distraction. Inevitably we see the ugly reality, that, as Isaac Asimov states, "The world in general disapproves of creativity.” We begin to feel discouraged about trying out unknown paths and experimenting.

A lot of my friends in the tech field are leaving great companies. Some of them even rush out of their prestigious positions while they are making great products that millions of people use. When I talk to them about their reasons and motivations to leave, I hear the same thing. The reason why great people leave companies is the cultural meltdowns.